Vacation
by PikaCheeka
Summary: Dietrich is determined to learn the secrets of the Killing Dolls, but all he really learns is how he and Tres do not get along, and how very different Garibaldi's machines are from most cyborgs. I can't deny the crack, but there is a serious side. NO PAIR


My computer coding is impossibly lame, just to warn you. I know 1334 fantastically but thought it best to keep that out of this, lest it turn crack. So I had to make something up on the spot and Di's code is what I got. Just pretend it's a lot cooler and a lot more complicated.

PG/PG13 for language.

Dietrich attempts to break Tres and return to the RCO with the Killing Dolls' operating system, but the cyborg's stark language quickly drives the boy into hysteria. Part dark, part semi-subtle comedy.

The ending tie-in is a bit more subtle than I would have liked, but after rewriting it six times, I'm just done with it. If anyone picks up the connection between the first and last lines and the symbolism, kudos to you. I really didn't make it obvious enough.

Vacation

By PikaCheeka

He didn't _really_ like smoking. Not enough to bother unless he was offered a cigarette. Unless, of course, he was able to steal one in plain view of one of his superiors. Now that was always an oddly exhilarating experience. And yet here he sits at a small café in Rome, smoking absently. He supposes it's more because he can than anything else, or perhaps he misses the smell of tobacco more than he cares to admit. It's been a week since he was at Headquarters, a week he's been on this mindless trip, eating up his vacation time. Military or no, two weeks was not enough time off, especially when one had a steady lover.

He sighs after a moment and stabs out his cigarette as the waitress approaches, leans back, and waits. The woman barely has time to place the tray at his table before hurrying away, wondering what exactly in God's name she just saw in that young man's eyes. If indeed it was anything to do with God at all. If God was the lord of all things vacant and abandoned, cold and dark and so very _evil_ in a way not abstract enough for her tastes. This is the fourth day the boy has been there. And every day a new employee waits on him. No one cares to look at him a second time.

The boy, or man, as he really is twenty despite his lithe body and sweet features, is used to this behavior by now. It has been the general reaction of all things sapient since he first learned to smile and his horrified father immediately proclaimed him to be a changeling. All in good fun, now that the past was behind him and he no longer had to worry about the daily beatings, the starvation, the fear, and, finally, the attempts on his life. No. Life was quite good now. Even if his vacation was only two weeks.

He drinks his coffee absently, not like a gentleman, not like he was taught, but like a tourist. It's what he's pretending to be right now. Easier to blend in that way, which is exactly why he's been hanging around the same cheap café for four days straight now. Waiting, biding his time, hoping an opportunity for him to strike comes before his two weeks are up. Hopefully well before, as he would like to reap the harvests of his labor. He glances at his watch for a moment. Daily mass is about to get out. The closest church is only just up the road; this café was chosen carefully, as the man he is targeting attends mass there twice a week. A simple break from the Vatican.

Dietrich half wonders why a cyborg would need a break from anything, but then, church _is _so monstrously boring and if one must go, a change of scenery is always nice. His lover once told him he had no taste for the aesthetics of ritual. He replied that ritual was mundane and, quite frankly, the only constant he ever cared for was their nocturnal affairs. You don't join a terrorist organization for the neat safety of ritual. But then, his lover was a poet and they were all freaks.

He actually laughs at this and stirs the coffee dregs absently, kicking his feet out and waiting. He doesn't like cities but the people can be just so entertaining. When he isn't struggling with his terror of them, that is. Not as if anyone who has only met him in the last few years knows of his fears. He has mastered the art of hiding them perfectly, but not the art of triumphing over them.

Which is only one of the reasons his new target has him so intrigued. He has heard of Tres Iquis, last of the Killing Dolls series, the great cyborg assassin, Vatican dog, and all-around conundrum. Everyone has heard of him. But it is Isaak, the poet, the madman, who is infatuated with the creature. He did, after all, go to university with Tres' creator. And how difficult can it be to sneak a bit of code out of this Tres? He can't be entirely immune.

Ten minutes. That's all Dietrich needs, he supposes. Ten minutes to master Tres. All he has to do is keep up a conversation for that long. Five minutes to find his weak point, find where his data lies. Half a moment to type in the proper coordinations, the other half of that moment to manage to brush the coding cube against the cyborg. Then wait for the data to melt into his system, to rush to his motherboard. Once there, it would only take perhaps 180 seconds to extract what it needed. And all that remained was to brush his wired glove against Tres again and all the coding would return to him. Simple. He had done it with thousands of computers and machines and weapons by now, even a few cyborgs.

But never a true Killing Doll.

At this point his thoughts were quickly straying to how delighted Isaak would be upon receiving such a gift. For Isaak fully believed that between the two of them, they could recreate the Killing Doll series, and the older man could then steal the glory so brutally ripped from him when he was expelled from University. He just killed somebody; it wasn't like he stole someone's work. Which, Dietrich realizes, is what he's doing now, but that's hardly the point. Right? As long as Isaak is happy again it really hardly matters. And having new toys to manipulate is never a bad thing…

Tres walks by.

Dietrich swears. He _never _daydreams. What was wrong with him? God, he was turning into Isaak, absent-minded and really a bit stupid. But he manages to recover quickly enough and drops his wallet. A standard conversation prompt. Not very creative, but he hardly had time to consider it. Luckily the cyborg is still near enough to hear the sound and turn slightly. And there Dietrich has him, his wires flicking out so quickly and lightly only his practiced hands could ever feel them.

_Pick it up. _It is a silent voice as he sits there, smiling his vacant smile now, chin in his other hand.

Tres doesn't even blink. He simply stares at the boy who looks so much like a photograph he was shown over a year ago. But he can not be sure.

_Come over here._

There is a definite creak of metal now as the cyborg turns away.

Dietrich doesn't like this any more. He's never had to tell someone to do something twice. _You damn son of a bitch, listen to me._ He twists his hand back well over an inch, pulling the strings enough to knock an ordinary man over, enough to make a grown man scream in pain. This is when he realizes nothing is attached. Tres has no nerve endings. "Son of a bitch." He bursts out and kicks the chair across from him. How could he have over-looked that? He was too caught up in his sick fantasies to even create a plan. How could he have been so stupid?

No. He wasn't stupid. He couldn't be. Tres had no nerve endings. Tres was a cyborg. And yet Dietrich had easily torn apart other cyborgs. So what made him so different from the rest? Was this the secret of Garibaldi?

Tres is looking at him now. "Are you well?" The voice is monotonous, dead, and unbelievably boring.

"No." the boy says quickly. Ten minutes talking to a vegetable. What was going on? _I just insulted you,_ he wants to scream, _respond to it! I don't care if you're a cyborg you're still supposed to be hurt. _

"Damage report?"

"What the fuh--" Damage? What kind of response was that? This is quite possibly the dumbest robot he has ever met.

"Incorrect response."

"What's wrong with you?" Dietrich finally snaps.

"I am unharmed."

This is very likely the strangest conversation the boy has ever suffered. And considering the company he keeps, this is a deeply unsettling thought. He clears his throat. "Be a dear and fetch me my wallet." He smiles and Tres does not respond to his smile. How annoying.

"I do not take commands from others."

He picks up more than voice tone and key words? Dietrich is making headway now, though it is not much. He will have to try it again. He had disguised his command with pretty words and a sweet tone, and, while that often worked with humans, Tres had ignored it. Tres had caught the unavoidable edge of anger. Tres can not be charmed. Then it hits Dietrich. All cyborgs he had ever worked with, indeed all cyborgs ever made, to his knowledge, were once human, which is perhaps why he liked them so much. They were remnants, not unlike his autojagger. Humans stripped down to something so scarcely human he felt safe, even happy, around them, but still human. The reason they were able to respond so like a human was because they _were_ human. Lifelike robots weren't advanced technology. They were barbaric. But Tres…Tres was brilliant. Brilliant. And, Dietrich realizes with a sinking feeling, hideously dull.

This is the reason Garibaldi's Killer Dolls are so impossibly unique. This is why the Vatican willingly, knowingly, recruited such a being. Garibaldi created the most perfect machine. And now Dietrich had to outwit something even less human than he was.

"Are you Tres?"

"Tres Iquis acknowledging speaker."

"That's a rather stupid response." He snorts, unable to help himself. He is always being chastised for being rude, but he supposes it hardly matters now, given his conversation partner is a pile of scrap metal.

This the robot entirely ignores.

Dietrich tries again. "Who is your master?"

"The Iron Maiden."

"Who is the Iron Maiden?" he knows who it is, of course, but he is curious now as to how much the cyborg is allowed to say.

"Answer not on file."

Now that is strange. The boy runs his hands through his brown hair. Does Tres really not know? He had been expecting a response akin to 'Locked Information'. "Hey, Tres."

"Tres Iquis, ac-"

"You're a little shit, you know that? Your master is Caterina Sforza. Did she ever tell you? Or is she too fucking high and mighty to even look at her subordinates?" he laughs when he says it now. How will the doll react to something like that? If the swears aren't programmed in as words of anger, which they likely aren't, 'subordinates' should certainly do something. A negative keyword and a positive voice fluctuation should surely cause difficulties.

At least, this is how he justifies it to himself when he is really just enraged. He feels he has been tricked, though by who he does not know. It is not unlike when he rages at his computer for crashing, though in the end it often makes him only cry harder. When there is no reaction, no pain, resulting from his words, a helpless panic begins to overwhelm him.

Tres is wonderously unresponsive. "Caterina Sforza. Unknown persons."

_Why aren't you breaking?_ He flicks his hand out again, desperately seeking something, anything, for his strings to catch onto. _Why can't I control you? _Does he not react to the tone of a voice? What made him think Tres did? He can't even remember what he had said. It has been just over a minute and no progress has been made, though now Dietrich has a sheen of sweat over his delicate skin and he is paler than normal.

"Repeat: Subject A minus 7." He finally says in desperation. If Tres is as inhuman as he behaves… It is an old code. Archaic, really, and distressingly simplistic. It is even worse than the code of the amateur hacker, which the boy mastered at age eight and used to swear vehemently at everyone in sight. Not that they understood him. But nobody would even know this code unless they made a life study of the Lost Technology, which is precisely why Dietrich knows of it.

"Mighty." Evidently Garibaldi knew of it as well. He likely supposed no one would ever be able to crack it.

"Repeat _exchange_: Subject A minus 8."

"What's wrong with you?"

Dietrich is getting closer now. He shifts and leans forward. "Repeat exchange: Subject A minus 8." The earlier question will knock the command down.

"Be a dear and fetch me my wallet."

So that's it. Tres had reacted to 'fetch' earlier. It wasn't his voice at all. Dietrich had unwittingly placed the emphasis on the 'dear'. But why would a robot existing solely for killing have that word programmed into him? It was absurd. The boy smiles, but this time it is at his own stupidity. He had presumed Tres was like all other cyborgs, created by sick, twisted, lonely individuals for private gain.

He licks his upper lip, as he often does when thinking, and bares his teeth slightly, a habit he used to be beaten for as a child. How does that old code work? "Insert: Subject A Subject Zero. Insert: Voice Command Subject A. Run: Voice Command Subject A." He must admit, he likes being Subject A, though all he had to do was initiate the conversation. A severe fault in early programming.

"Awaiting command, master."

But this only enrages Dietrich. Why would Isaak want a creature like this? He fumes inwardly, who would want a creature one can control but not lord over? It is pointless. Stupid. He now has complete control over this piece of metal. But it is just that. It's as boring as shooting a gun. Even if it kills someone, it isn't mindplay. It isn't real power. It's just _boring_.

He considers dropping it entirely and returning the cyborg to its rightful master. It's just an it, after all. Not a he. But he does not know the coding title for Sforza. The master is zero. But now he is zero and Caterina is nothing. And she really is nothing. It is how the old coding fault redeemed itself. One was never able to command a cyborg to attack its original master on this behavior, or anyone not immediately present for that matter, not without the main data disc, which he presumes is back in Vatican City.

"This is stupid."

"Are you well?"

"Shut up and die." He stands up. He doesn't mean it, not really. But he certainly isn't going to waste any more of his vacation on this. Tres would be useful on their side, he reflects, but nothing more. He would just be another gun, another tank. He wouldn't even make a good spy. One had to know discretion to be a spy. One had to be alive. And really, Tres wouldn't be so very fun to have around the headquarters. It's not as if Dietrich can annoy him or anything. Tres may be a doll, but not a puppet. He can't be manipulated or teased or insulted. He can't be tormented or harassed. There isn't even anything to study, as his operating system was laid bare in a matter of minutes. He may be a ground-breaking bit of work, but really, he's very boring when it comes down to it.

Dietrich is halfway back to the hotel before he realizes he is laughing to himself. He wonders how long Tres will stand there blankly outside the café before someone, presumably Abel, who tends to get the shit jobs, finds him and drags his bulk back to the Vatican. He glances at his watch. He likely won't be able to get a ticket for an airship out this late in the evening, but at any rate he can place a phone call or two. He may not have gotten a concrete example of the code, but he does have the information. Not that he'll tell his lover. He bites his finger absently before asking for the key. No. Isaak will have to work to get the answers out of him. But even that prospect hardly matters to Dietrich now. It is the conversation he is looking forward to most. Because regardless of how stupid and inane it is, regardless of how easily Isaak can enrage him, it is a challenge he loves.

Far better than wasting his vacation talking to a cyborg that can be understood in minutes.

After all, he_ likes_ using his strings.


End file.
